Man of the Hour (16 page)

Finally he was ready. “I am wondering,” he said, taking a deep breath, “if maybe some time, you would take coffee with me.”

There was a long pause as they pulled up at a red light on 51st Street, facing a Howard Johnson’s motel and Bagel Espresso cafe.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t think so,” said the girl in the back.

“You don’t think so?” Nasser cocked his head to the side as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

Pedestrians passed silently before his silver fender. He looked down and saw his fingers twisting around the grooves in the steering wheel. Long, broken Arab fingers. Perhaps she only wanted American fingers touching her body. He tried to put the thought out of his mind before he became enraged.

“Okay!” He tried to pull himself up in his seat. “No problem!”

“I am sorry.” In the rearview mirror, she’d gone back to looking through her papers.

The song on the radio changed to one called “The Loneliest Man in the World,” and something about the singer’s sad deep voice pulled at Nasser and made him uneasy.

She’d said no. He drove without speaking the next few minutes, trying to absorb the hurt. It was okay. He’d been rejected before in this country. In the streets, in the hallways at school, in Mr. Fitzgerald’s class.
I can’t pass you with the kind of work you’re doing.
God be merciful, this was a maddening place.

“Okay, this is it,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

They’d arrived at her address. The building with the statue of a man holding up the world. Wasn’t there a passport office around here? The girl handed him a five-dollar bill and jumped out of the cab before he could ask if she wanted change. A young black man was waiting for her on the sidewalk, with a shiny shaved head and a gold earring that winked in the sun. The girl in the pants suit ran up and threw her arms around him, kissing him passionately on the lips.

Watching this, Nasser felt his heart incinerate. How he hated America. The things that looked beautiful turned out to be ruined inside. And things that seemed to be within easy reach were, in fact, a million miles away.

He stuffed the money into his front pants pocket, not caring if it got crumpled or torn. The stench from a nearby food vendor cooking sausages on a grill turned his stomach. Thanks be to God that Youssef was giving him a chance to make up for the mistake at the school. This was mercy and forgiveness.
Allahu akbar.
The life of this world was but a sport and a pastime, its riches transitory. In just a few days, Youssef’s friend would come into town and there would be a much bigger
hadduta
, and everyone would forget about this schoolteacher. They’d be too busy with the Great Chastisement.

He looked once more at the girl kissing the black man on the sidewalk and then stepped on the gas and drove away downtown, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Saks Fifth Avenue, with the Rolling Stones bursting from his speakers and the smell of burning flesh still in his nostrils.

15

“OF COURSE, WE’RE PROUD
of David,” Larry Simonetti, the school’s waxy, cherubic principal was telling Sara Kidreaux, the television reporter. “But really, he’s typical of the kind of teacher we’ve been able to bring into our school. And we’re fortunate to have the kind of nurturing relationship that …”

The media, David Fitzgerald was discovering, was a physical universe unto itself, with its own laws of gravity, velocity, and entropy. Entering its atmosphere changed you and charged you with special properties, which attracted some bodies and repelled others.

He was standing in the school hallway with Larry and Sara Kidreaux, surrounded by a semicircle of cameramen, sound technicians, and light handlers. An outer ring of some three dozen students had formed around the media people to watch them watching Sara Kidreaux watching Larry watching David.

Apparently, he’d become a potent political symbol in the last few hours, with the President and the governor, who’d probably be running against each other next year, both invoking his name. And in the euphoria of the moment, the morning’s tense state of alertness seemed to slip away, and David found himself beginning to let go of his own suspicions and apprehensions a little.

So now there was not just one but four camera crews working the corridors and classrooms, trying to come up with footage to supplement the rescue video. It fascinated David to see how their presence altered his relationship to various people. Students he’d never seen before were speaking authoritatively to reporters about his presence in their lives. Gene Dorf, the department chair, who spent all his time avoiding students and playing the stock market, stood in a doorway, declaring that David was his best friend. David’s actual best friend, Henry Rosenthal, was outside the cafeteria, riffing to interviewers in ever so slightly biting tones about “David’s particular teaching philosophy.” Since the explosion, David had noticed a mild undertone of tension between them, as if he’d violated some agreement they’d had to remain ineffectual white guys together.

And Donna Vitale, with her big frizzy hair and one errant eye, stood under the fire exit, simply saying she wasn’t surprised. Somehow David sensed she was the one person who would have said the same thing whether or not there were cameras present. He gave her a long, admiring look, deciding that once all this excitement was over, he was definitely going to ask her out.

Meanwhile, Larry Simonetti was leaning closer and closer to David as Sara Kidreaux tried to interview them. After all the bad publicity of recent months, he was clinging to his famous teacher like a life raft.

“Because that’s what it’s all about, Sara,” he was saying. “Education. And the kids. Making sure
they
get what they need.”

“Absolutely.” David took the occasion to move up right behind Larry and put a hand on his shoulder. “And that’s why I was so glad to hear about the new books and special programs we’re getting in next year’s budget.”

Larry’s waxy complexion turned even paler and his eyebrows shot up toward his hairline.

“Riiight.” A saliva bubble formed at the end of his tongue. “David, don’t you have a class you have to teach now?”

Ninth period, David’s last class of the day, was pandemonium. Not only were three camera crews set up at the back of the room to watch him teach, there were twice as many kids as usual. At least seventy of them sucking up the oxygen, sharing desks, turning around and hoping some part of their faces or bodies would wind up on the evening news. A few were even crouching at his feet to fit into the classroom, as if he were some aging rock star or spiritual leader of the moment giving a college lecture.

“He was a legitimate hero,” David read aloud from
A Farewell to Arms
, “who bored everyone he met …”

“Hold it, hold it!”

Sara Kidreaux suddenly rose from the back of the class and made her way toward him between the tightly packed seats, a vision in red with sculpted blond hair.

“What’s the matter?” David looked down at her.

“I’m sorry.” She smiled, embarrassed, and looked back at one of her technical people, an enormously fat young man sniffling in overalls. “My sound man has a sinus infection and that last part you said isn’t going to come out on the track. Could I ask you to do it over again?”

“Well, I, uh … hate to interrupt the flow of the class.”

“Please.” She stood on her tiptoes again, looking eager and adorably hapless. “It would
really
make our lives easier.”

“Well …”

“Yeah, go ahead, chief!” The kids were into it, easily sliding into the roles of patient movie extras.

“Yeah, we don’t mind!” a girl called out.

“Do what you gotta do, man.” A macho go-along-get-along kid’s voice that David didn’t recognize.

He shrugged, wanting to please everyone. “All right, I guess I could do it again.”

Sara Kidreaux gave a little shiver of delight. “Oh, one more thing.”

She lightly licked her fingertips and smoothed back a lock of his hair.

“Aa-wooo-woo!” The kids loved it, supplying an overlay of sexual tension that David wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Sara Kidreaux blushed and wiggled just slightly as she returned to her seat.

“Anyway.” David clapped his hands and moved back to the blackboard. “I think what Hemingway is saying is that a hero becomes a bore unless we can …”

“I’m sorry, again,” Sara Kidreaux called out from behind her tremendous sound man. “That time you had your back to the camera. Can we try it just once more?”

David started to protest and say he felt like a performing bear, but something stopped him. On the one hand, television and the rest of the electronic media were everything he’d been fighting against. They shortened his students’ attention spans, rotted their brains. His own son was affected. “Daddy, when can I get Playstation?” Arthur had asked the other day. “Who’s stronger, Batman or Superman?”

On the other hand, it was irresistible. A part of him cried out for all this attention and acclaim. The same part that had sat longing to be noticed in the lifeguard chair, back in Atlantic Beach all those years ago. Or had stood in the outfield, waiting for someone to hit him the ball. Now here was the ball.

“Just one more, for me?” Sara Kidreaux begged with long lashes fluttering.

“Go ’head, chief!” the kids cheered him on.

“Yeah, well, I guess, all right.” He took a deep breath and began again. “A hero is a bore …”

He stepped out into the hall afterward, feeling half elated and half abashed. How could he have given in so easily? But then again, how could he have held out? He might not have done much actual teaching today, but for once he had everyone listening, even the unreachables.

Michelle Richardson brushed past him, saying he had a message from Noonan, the police detective. The words barely sank in. Three kids were waiting to talk to him by the library entrance across the hallway. He knew what two of them wanted. Scott Cunningham, a lanky science-obsessed senior whose mother and father had both died of AIDS, needed help filling out a college financial aid application. Next to him, Roberto Suarez, an aspiring artist from sixth period, wanted David to help him persuade his father to let him finish school, instead of making him go to work in the family fish store.

But Elizabeth Hamdy was standing a little bit behind the two boys, and David still didn’t know what she was after. She looked as though she was lost in a private conversation with herself, as she stared down at the floor, contemplating her skates lying there.

“I’m sorry about before.” He started to approach her first. “We really do have to talk. Your brother came by the other day.”

“I know.” She threw back her head and the sides of her scarf flapped like wings. “That’s part of what I want to talk to you about.”

They started to meet in the center of the corridor. But then Larry Simonetti suddenly came high-stepping down the hall, his wing tips making a busy slap-slap on the floor.

“Hey, David, you’re not going to believe this,” he said sotto voce as he moved between them. “We’ve got CNN
and
Dan Rather downstairs.”

“Okay, but I’ve got to talk to Elizabeth and then Scottie and then Roberto.” He threw the boys encouraging glances, letting them know he hadn’t forgotten them.

Larry gripped his arm. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. We’ve got
CNN and Dan Rather
.”

“Jesus, Larry.” David shook him loose. “You sound like one of my kids.”

But Elizabeth was already starting to withdraw, while Scott and Roberto peeled off in the other direction.

“Hey, where are you guys going?” David called after them.

“You’re still busy,” Elizabeth muttered as she faded down the hall, turned the corner, and disappeared.

A muted sense of having betrayed someone lingered with David for a few seconds. He’d always prided himself on being available to the kids, even giving out his home phone to the worst of the knuckleheads and telling them to call any time something was bothering them. But today he’d let them down. Despite all his intentions, he’d allowed himself to get glossed, glamorized, and artificially sweetened by the media.

“Okay, let’s move.” Larry was pulling him over to the stairwell. “We don’t want to lose these guys.”

Though he was a full five inches taller, David allowed himself to be dragged along. It was useless to resist. A part of him was already out there, being beamed up and carried aloft on the airwaves, rising above the boardwalk and Mermaid Avenue, over the skyscraper canyons and tenements of Manhattan, out past the farms of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and into the Great American heartland. Montana cattle looked up to see him passing and Pacific volcanoes yawned below. By nightfall, people in Budapest and Beijing would know his name.

“Hey, Larry, am I at least going to get some extra books for the kids out of this?”

“We’ll talk about it later, smartass. Unless you want to go to your girlfriends in the media first.”

David followed him down the stairs, glimpsing a patch of sky through a smudged window. It was happening.

Little bits of him were raining all over the world.

16

THE NEXT MORNING,
Judy Mandel from the
Trib
burst into the public information office on the thirteenth floor of One Police Plaza with her skirt riding high and the top three buttons of her blouse undone.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it! How come no one in this office has a tampon?”

John LeVecque, the former
Post
reporter who’d recently been named deputy commissioner for public information, looked up, startled and flustered.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you on that count,” he said, reddening slightly.

“Why don’t they have tampon dispensers in the ladies’ room in this building? Don’t you think they should?”

She’d decided to throw him off balance by treating him the way cops had treated her for the last eighteen months. Like a rube. Except instead of talking about great blow jobs from strippers or bending a bit at the waist and farting for the amusement of everyone else present, she decided to stick her womanhood right in his face. It was no good being shy around these characters. You had to show you were tougher man them, that nothing they could do would shock you. In fact, you were better off trying to shock them first.